Leviathan in the Flood Katrina and the Fishy
Logic of the State by Lila Rajiva
www.dissidentvoice.org
September 16, 2005

“All
glories to you, O Lord of the Universe, who took the form of a fish. When
the sacred hymns of the Vedas were lost in the waters of universal
devastation, you swam like a boat in that vast ocean to rescue them.”

--
Jayadeva, classical Hindu poet

Mythology
has it that the first incarnation of Lord Vishnu -- the second person of
the Hindu trinity -- took place after the sacred word of ancient India was
snatched away by a demon. The periodic flooding and dissolution of
creation that ended each world epoch was about to take place. But Vishnu
disguised as a gargantuan fish rescued the divine word just in time and
steered it away through the cascading water in a boat packed with seeds
and animals salvaged for the next round of creation. In the Hebrew Bible,
this legend of the flood loses its Piscean hero but Noah’s ark still saves
the animal and plant kingdom “two by two” -- male and female -- from the
fluid chaos.

In the
Big Easy it seems the saviors were not so organized or logical. Not two by
two but by tens and perhaps thousands, men and women, the frail and the
tender, were left to rot and bloat in the stinking water. No pagan
fish-god to the rescue, no ark. Instead the ancient Titan ruled -- Chaos.

Chaos
was what Hobbes, the philosopher of the all-powerful state, feared more
than anything else. For him, brute nature and human nature ungoverned told
only one story -- the war of all against all. And it had only one remedy
-- an all-powerful state. For a metaphor for that state Hobbes turned to
Leviathan, the whale-monster in the Biblical tale of Job. Hobbes, a
Christian, believed that Leviathan alone could save mankind from its
self-created chaos.

Man’s
nature was too depraved to attain salvation on his own. He had to be under
dominion.

Judging by the coverage of Louisiana’s watery inferno, though the left and
right keep tearing each other apart on everything else like endlessly
divorcing spouses, on the inhumanity of man left to his own devices, they
coo in one voice.

Here,
conservative columnist David Brooks writing in the New York Times
blames New Orleans on a “failure in administration” and there, Katrina Van
den Heuvel of The Nation decries the state for abandoning its
people. No question. But then both turn around and beg for more. Brooks
wants more anti-poverty programs and Van den Heuvel goes one better with a
second New Deal. Having diagnosed the poison in the body politic, right
and left want to give carte blanche to the arch poisoner.

The
statism clatters right out of the closet:

Brooks
(September 4, 2005) mourns the past “Hobbesian decade,” and the “dark
realities that it is not in our nature to readily acknowledge: the thin
veneer of civilization, the elemental violence in human nature, the
lurking ferocity of the environment...”

For
left and right, the problem is homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to
man.

For
left and right, the answer is Hobbes’ monster.

And so
the numberless delicate acts of coordination, reciprocity, and
self-sacrifice by which the people of New Orleans and their well-wishers
all over America showed their distinctly un-lupine natures made no impact.
Even those who recognized them still argued that the state would have to
intervene in a much bigger way the next time to muzzle the shiftless,
antisocial, thieving poor or to choke public-spiritedness out of the
racist, antisocial, exploitative rich. The poor without the state cannot
be relied on to overcome, and the rich without the state cannot be relied
on to help.

This
is slander of human nature, poor or rich. This is amnesia of the real
history of human beings whose voluntary cooperation has over and over
again shored up the levees of civilization against the barbaric outbursts
of the state. When human nature has been most vicious, it has most often
learned its vice at the knee of its rulers.

A
glance at the reports from New Orleans shows that it was state action of
some kind that created and exacerbated this catastrophe down the line.

It was
the federal government which violated development regulations protecting
the wetlands south of the city which would have blunted the force of the
typhoons.

It was
the federal government which cut the funding for levee repair to hold the
Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain out of the low-lying city.

It was
the federal government which diverted a third of Louisiana's National
Guards to the Iraq war when they might have aided the rescue.
(1)

While
$600 million of private aid flowed to Louisiana, FEMA was busy sabotaging
relief efforts:

“Wal-Mart trucks containing water and supplies were turned away; the Coast
Guard was prevented from delivering diesel fuel; a 600-bed Navy hospital
was left unused; firefighters were ordered away from flood sites; donated
generators were refused; and rescue attempts by private citizens were
rebuffed.” (2)

Is
this a record that suggests a bigger helping of state action? Is it too
hard to imagine that people on their own, without their all-knowing,
all-powerful leaders, could voluntarily contribute to their own welfare?
Apparently, for right and left wing ideologues it is.

But in
fact, people did just that, opening their homes, treating the sick,
sharing food and water, coordinating escape routes, simply suffering
together

They
acted as individuals in a community, not fragments of a mass. Not a mass
to be rescued by the left or a mass to be beaten back by the right. And
like individuals everywhere, some broke under the strain, some could not
live up to their better natures, some were perhaps driven to insanity or
rage so great that they shot at each other and at their rescuers. But
perhaps they were simply shooting at the insignia of the all-knowing
all-powerful monster.

By
ignoring the individuality of human beings, left and right connive to read
the problems of society as a problem of equal numbers. Each individual no
more nor less than any other and each interchangeable. Left and right
reduce the individuality of human interchange to arithmetical addition and
subtraction. To units of a mass to be computed. To commercial calculation.

Nietzsche named this poisonous logic the reasoning of the herd and saw
behind the scientific statecraft which uses it nothing more than a
manipulative and insatiable urge to power:

“Whatever the state saith is a lie; whatever it hath is a theft: all is
counterfeit in it, the gnawing, sanguinary, insatiate monster.”

Of
course, Nietzsche also saw the same will to power behind the wisdom of the
philosopher-statesmen and the priesthoods. But unlike the Oida of
the Greeks, the Vedas of the Hindus, or the Logos of the
Christians, the rationality of the modern state from the start set its
face unrelentingly against the idea that goodness and wisdom might flower
naturally in human beings. For Hobbes, human nature, like brute nature,
was simply a mechanism prone to chaos and in need of overwhelming force to
subjugate it. The only part of natural law that Hobbes did not discard was
the right of self-preservation and in its pursuit, anything was
permissible.

Force
and fraud -- otherwise known by the high-minded as raison d’etat,
was the rationality of the state from the start.

It was
a reason like none before it.

From
the science of the Enlightenment it took the binary logic by which push
must be followed by pull and up by down, where every action has an equal
and opposite reaction and this can never be that. Reason became
mechanical.

From a
dying Christianity it took dualism. Nature was severed from man, matter
decapitated from spirit, object estranged from subject. The cogito
of Descartesbegan itsbloodless reign, and unhoused and
unfleshed, the ghost-mind led the body around haughtily by the nose like a
Brahmin chivvying an untouchable. Reason became alienated.

Then,
not too long after Christianity had driven the fairy folk and the
whispering spirits, the witches and the wizards, the daivas and
asuras of the pagans underground, the new scientists of mechanism,
bent on usurping the waning power of the Church, took the next step and
drained Nature of the last remnants of enchantment, bringing the old
goddess to her knees, submissive. But when they did so, they snuffed out
human nature as well. Individuality and intuition perished, Reason became
unnatural.

Finally, from the mercantilists of the newborn European empires, the new
reason borrowed its calculating streak. Like the Romans, who extended the
word ratio from the accounting of money (rationes) to the
practice of reckoning in general, state reason modeled its logic on the
state counting houses. Wet-nursed by the accounting practices of the
pirate merchants, the new reason never grew up but stayed forever suckling
at those hard teats. Reason became exploitative.

The
calculating “dog-eat-dog” philosophy that the left mistakenly pins on
private enterprise per se was therefore strictly always the spawn
of the state. And those who think that it can be domesticated to
their pet social schemes, however laudable, are as mistaken as
Frankenstein. Today, Leviathan’s one body has two heads, corporate-state
and managed capital. To feed one is to fatten the other.

That’s
why looting quickly became the most repeated image out of New
Orleans.

Why
not? There was looting all around, though only the least of it appeared on
our TV screens.

What
we never saw:

1) The
looting of federal tax money, withdrawn from New Orleans flood control and
diverted to a profligate and criminal war abroad.

2) The
looting of the consumer as oil companies used the flood as an excuse to
jack-up gas prices.

4) The
looting of private citizens’ firearms under the guise of maintaining law
and order.

5) The
looting of the currency as the federal government cranks out more paper
money to paper over the $52 billion hole that Katrina will put in the
nation’s finances.

And
the looting will roll as businesses, fresh from the bid-rigging and
cronyism in Iraq, rush into the reconstruction racket. And it will roll on
as the bloated government lets out its belt a notch and begins stuffing
its face again. And it will roll triumphant when the businesses which root
in the same trough with government seize Kelo to smash the last bastion of
the free citizen, his home. (3)

The
whole country smells the stink of New Orleans.

Looting by elites, by the middle class, by the underclass. The last
perhaps the least pernicious.

And in
each case, it was the insertion of the state into society that created the
provocation, the opportunity, and the cover for the looters.

In
fact, the so-called anti-government right that Van den Heuvel loathes is
really not anti-government enough by half. It’s anti-tax positions begin
and end largely around the destruction of welfare for the poor. Welfare
for the rich however passes muster. One of the most vocal anti-government
activists, Grover Norquist, somehow manages to be in favor of government
regulation suddenly when it comes to monopoly pricing for drug companies.

Leviathan is rotten but it rots from the head down.

Make
no mistake. The state did not fail in New Orleans. It succeeded. It did
just what its logic drives it to do. It acted in the interests of its
masters, a handful of the privileged. Before the universal protection of
citizens’ lives, it put the selective securing of property. And when
reconstruction begins we will again see lives displaced by the
manipulation of the market as the forced reconstruction/gentrification of
New Orleans begins, as it has begun in cities all over the country. As it
has taken place in Baghdad. It was no accident that the U.S.S. Bataan, in
which Iraqi prisoners were held secretly, was sent to New Orleans. It was
no accident that active duty forces are reported to have intervened. It
was no accident that the victims of the flood were labeled refugees and
insurgents. New Orleans was a brilliant photo-op. State created
lawlessness inviting military intervention. Inviting destruction and
rebuilding, the sanctified looting of the state.

Market
manipulation, the one constant in the vicious Rake’s Progress that
is the history of the imperial state.

The
drunken looter’s logic of the broken window that Von Mises described.

Smash
a country and reconstruct it -- that is the state’s job creation. Waste a
resource and price-fix -- that is the state’s energy policy. Borrow and
then devalue your debt -- that is the state’s financial planning.
Artificially inflate house prices and drive out the city’s renters -- the
state’s urban renewal program.

Katrina of Nature speaks louder and clearer than Katrina of The Nation.
Her senseless violence recognizes itself in the mirror of the state, shows
it for what is. That is the lesson of New Orleans: human society pinned
helplessly between the alienated power of senseless nature and the
alienating power of a malevolent state. Two desolations.